I’ve written a lot about friendship over the past few years. Despite the topic, which often lends itself to humor and levity, the story of American friendship has been sobering. Over the past several decades, close friendships that have been a central feature of American social and civic life have been disappearing. More Americans report feeling lonely or isolated and spend more time by themselves. Men have been especially hard hit by America’s “friendship recession”. None of this is new, but there was some hope that once the pandemic was over, these social connections might recover. After all, much of the recent research that revealed America’s growing social malaise was conducted in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. But a few years on, there is not much good news. In a brand-new report, “Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in Civic Life,” Sam Pressler and I find the number of close friends that Americans have is still much lower than it once was. Not only that, but we also doc…
